StephenBlogs

In this post, I'd like to talk very frankly about why I chose to leave not one but two PhD programs before finding my home here in Curriculum Studies. While this is less of a specific event as directed by the prompt, it has deeply effected how I approach my work, academic and professional, my identity construction, and how I choose to share these experiences. In some sense, this post is really about relationships, particularly with your advisor.  I think every PhD student remembers the day they got their acceptance letter/call. For me, the first time, it was early April 2014. I was set to graduate with my MA from Ball State in May and had spend much of the last year focused on PhD applications. I applied to 6 schools and was rejected by 5 of them; luckily, the school that accepted me, IU, was my first choice. After multiple interviews, a campus visit, and several emails, I finally received a formal offer letter to join the Telecommunications (Media Effects) program. It was one of t...

Yesterday, I attended a workshop called "Conference Paper Writing and Presenting: Strategies for Success," led by Matt Del Busto, a writing specialist at Purdue’s Writing Lab. Matt, who has an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, has a knack for blending creativity with practicality, which made for an interesting mix of advice on writing and presenting conference papers. It wasn’t a “reinvent the wheel” type of workshop, but it definitely offered some thoughtful reminders and a few new tricks to consider. One of the main takeaways for me was the idea of focusing on the so what factor of your research. It’s easy to get caught up in the technical details or the process of your work, but Matt kept coming back to the importance of framing everything around what the audience should take away. He talked about crafting a clear and concise central message—kind of like an elevator pitch, but less robotic and more tailored to the audience at hand. It made me realize how muc...

use third-person constructed narratives instead of first-person accounts to balance fidelity to participants’ experiences with the analytical depth provided by the researchers’ interpretations. This approach allows for the integration of theoretical frameworks, such as boundary spanning, into the narratives while avoiding an over-reliance on direct quotations. By adopting a third-person style, the authors could synthesize data from interviews to create cohesive portrayals of participants’ experiences In this post, I plan to review a few articles I've read recently that I expect will make their way into the second or third chapter of my dissertation. As a reminder, I'm planning to explore narratives of leadership and liberation (i.e., a liberatory curricula ala Friere & hooks) amongst undergraduate engineering student organization leaders. This topic not only aligns well with my day-to-day professional work, but is also deeply interesting to me as I've been able to witne...

For my second blog, I'll be talking a little about my doc program, educational history, research interests, and professional goals. Dr. Hogue - for your ease, I have bolded my one-sentence research topic in the first paragraph below.  I'm currently nearing completion of coursework in the Curriculum Studies program in Purdue University's College of Education. Curriculum Studies focuses on the concept of curriculum broadly and generally - though not always - take a qualitative, critical approach to asking questions like "What knowledge is worth knowing, and who gets to decide?" I transferred into the Curriculum Studies program from Purdue's Higher Education program, due to a) a conflict with my previous advisors and b) a better fit for my research interests and work-life balance. My original interest in the program was in a subfield called public pedagogy - this field looks at 'curricula' outside of traditional learning spaces: ie, what is the curriculum...

  I'm Stephen Stewart and I recently made friends with this Blue Morpho butterfly at a conservatory on a recent trip to Michigan's upper peninsula.  Blue Morphos in the wild are exceedingly rare, though not so much rare at a conservatory. I'm approaching this blog in the same way - I'm not usually one for this sort of public communication (it's rare from me in the wild), but perhaps I can find some safety in doing this for class, to start (our conservatory).  I'm a 5th year (or, maybe 3rd year, or maybe 10th year - depends on how you count) PhD student in Purdue's Curriculum Studies program. I've been in the Curriculum Studies program since Spring 2022, and transferred in from the Higher Education program which I began in Fall 2020. All of this, of course, was borne out of the stubbornness I developed after leaving a Media Psychology PhD program at IU in 2016. Okay, it's not all stubbornness, but as I'm diving into learning more about narrative i...